Some books are read for who has written it; some are for the contents, and some for style. One should read Dr S Jaishankar’s book titled The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World for all the above three. A former Foreign Secretary of India and now its Foreign Minister, Jaishankar has written on what could be a strategy for India, with an interesting style of weaving a story through looking back (from Awadh and even Mahabharata) to look ahead.
Two questions during the recent decades on India’s decision-making process and its global outlook are worth revisiting. Does India have a strategic culture? And does India draw the experiences from its history and that of the regional empires in pursuing a contemporary foreign policy? Before opening the book, the title The India Way would make a reader question whether there is an ‘Indian way’. As Jaishankar himself cautions in the beginning, seeking truth from facts would not be easy, and underlines the challenges of ‘political correctness’ and the ‘weight of accumulated dogma’. Not an easy task; but, he does it in style.